The Messenger Is the Message

A glorious visit to the Jack Whitten retrospective at MoMA

Before I left for vacation, I paid two visits to New York’s Museum of Modern Art to see the work of Jack Whitten. I cannot recall the last time I’d attended a show about an artist I not only had never seen but had never heard of that so impressed and delighted me. I’ve been rhapsodizing for days.

Whitten was an incredibly innovative artist, constantly exploring new materials and new modes of making art. Early in his career, he became excited by acrylic paints with their extraordinary vibrancy and variety of color. He was an abstractionist from the start, and a through line in his career was experimenting with ways to combine careful planning with the effects of chance. At a certain point, he began working on the floor, layering acrylic paint and then dragging a tool that he called the “developer” across the surface, sometimes with a comb attached, sometimes with other implements, that together would smear the paint across while also digging into it and revealing the layers beneath.

The result?

Mirsinaki Blue, 1974.

It’s easy to see the influence of the island of Crete, where Whitten established a studio, both on the color and the fluidity of this painting. But I also see an oily puddle, the kind of thing you might see on the streets of Harlem—or in Whitten’s childhood home, the industrial town of Bessemer, Alabama.

Here’s a very different example from the same era:

This painting is part of Whitten’s Greek Alphabet series, mostly gray-scale acrylic painting that he raked with an African comb, resulting in a deeply textured surface but also an iridescent shimmer of color that doesn’t really come across in a photograph.

Here’s a close-up of the surface:

I was enchanted by the way Whitten used synthetic materials to create effects that looked deeply informed by nature, and vice versa. At one point he began experimenting with copier toner, and made works that looked like they were created with light on photographic paper, but were actually “painted.” In one of them, he produced wave-like undulations in the surface by literally submerging the paper in water.

Later in his career, Whitten turned to mosaic—but he didn’t assemble them out of pieces of stone. Instead, he would pour acrylic paint into molds, sometimes adding metal dust or other materials to the mix, then shatter the sheets of dried paint into pieces that would then form the basis of his mosaics. The result?

Black Monolith, II: Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994

The materials in that painting include acrylic paint, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell and a razor blade, a list that surely had layers of private meaning for Whitten. What I see is a portrait that is a populated shadow, a dark, amorphous form filled with layer upon layer of color and texture, an especially fitting tribute to Ellison and his literary masterwork.

Here’s another mosaic piece, a 9/11 memorial that took Whitten five years to complete after the attacks, which he saw from the window of his studio downtown:

A detail from that painting:

Like so many of Whitten’s paintings, it isn’t exactly figurative, but also isn’t exactly abstract. It feels like a profoundly detailed impression, an emotional record of that day. It isn’t a metaphor. At the exhibit, there was a page from Whitten’s journal that was dominated by a list of things Whitten didn’t want to be metaphors—“I don’t want ethnicity to be a metaphor | I don’t want sexuality to be a metaphor | I don’t want decoration to be used as a metaphor”—and so on. The painting is the thing itself, expressed in paint, itself transformed into mosaic tiles and also found objects of collage (the footprints of the painting, for example, were made by pouring acrylic paint into impressions made by actual footprints).

Whitten was an abstractionist, but the concrete influences of his life were all over his work. He was the son of a coal miner and a seamstress, first studied medicine at the Tuskegee Institute, then art at Southern University in Baton Rouge, then, fleeing the violent response to the Civil Rights movement, made his way to New York in 1960, to study art at Cooper Union (where he was the first Black student) and then to settle in Harlem. He married a Greek-American woman, Mary Staikos, and with her began traveling to Crete, where he established a sculpture studio. Alabama, New York, Greece and Africa are all visible influences on his work, as, pervasively, is jazz. But I also saw so many artistic influences: Arshile Gorky, Norman Lewis, Louise Nevelson, Kurt Schwitters, Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close. I don’t know if these all actually were influences (well, Gorky and Lewis pretty clearly were). What I saw could as easily have been parallels as influences, because I never felt like what I was seeing was derivative in any way. Everything felt so distinctively Whitten.

I just can’t get over how much I loved the show. I also can’t get over how I’d never heard of Whitten before. That’s substantially on me—there was an exhibit at Dia:Beacon of his Greek Alphabet series three years ago, and there have certainly been other exhibits in recent years. But Whitten had a five-decade career. He clearly was a major artist. He should have been part of the “story” of postwar modernism for a long time now, a story that MoMA has done more than any institution to write, and that I first learned when I was still a teenager. Already by then, he should have been part of it. I’m sure those who knew, knew. But I didn’t. I should have.

Well, that’s what major retrospectives like these are for, right? These days we’re getting a lot of these corrections or revisions of the record, and sometimes they feel like special pleading, minor artists being promoted above their proper station for reasons of representation. With Whitten, that was so emphatically not the case that the exhibit effectively made the case not only for Whitten himself, but for the whole increasingly-beleaguered process of looking for artists like him.

If you’re in New York this month, go see it.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through August 2nd.